The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (144 page)

12

RUTH SPENT MOST of the fall of 1976 in hiding. Her father had not expressly thrown her out of the house, but he did not make her feel welcome there after the incident. The incident was not that Ruth and Owney had been caught by Pastor Wishnell, hiking out of the Courne Haven woods at daybreak after Dotty Wishnell’s wedding. That was unpleasant, but the incident occurred four days later, at dinner, when Ruth asked her father, “Don’t you even want to know what I was doing in the woods with Owney Wishnell?”

Ruth and her father had been stepping around each other for days, not speaking, somehow managing to avoid eating meals together. On this night, Ruth had roasted a chicken and had it ready when her father came in from fishing. “Don’t worry about me,” he’d said, when he saw Ruth setting the table for two. “I’ll pick some dinner up over at Angus’s,” and Ruth said, “No, Dad, let’s eat here, you and me.”

They didn’t talk much over dinner. “I did a good job with this chicken, didn’t I?” Ruth asked, and her father said that, sure, she’d done a real good job. She asked how things were working out with Robin Pommeroy, whom her father had recently hired back, and Stan said the kid was as stupid as ever, what did you expect? That sort of talk. They finished dinner quietly.

As Stan Thomas picked up his plate and headed to the sink, Ruth asked, “Dad. Don’t you even want to know what I was doing in the woods with Owney Wishnell?”

“No.”

“No?”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t care who you spend your time with, Ruth, or what you do with him.”

Stan Thomas rinsed off his plate, came back to the table, and took Ruth’s plate without asking whether she was finished with dinner and without looking at her. He rinsed her plate, poured himself a glass of milk, and cut himself a slice of Mrs. Pommeroy’s blueberry cake, which was sitting on the counter under a sweaty tent of plastic wrap. He ate the cake with his hands, leaning over the sink. He wiped the crumbs on his jeans with both hands and covered the cake with the plastic wrap again.

“I’m heading over to Angus’s,” he said.

“You know, Dad,” she said, “I’ll tell you something.” She didn’t get up from her chair. “I think you should have an opinion about this.”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t.”

“Well, you should. You know why? Because we were having sex.”

He picked his jacket off the back of his chair, put it on, and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” Ruth asked.

“Angus’s. Said that already.”

“That’s all you have to say? That’s your opinion?”

“Don’t have any opinion.”

“Dad, I’ll tell you something else. There’s a lot of things going on around here that you should have an opinion about.”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t.”

“Liar,” Ruth said.

He looked at her. “That’s no way to talk to your father.”

“Why? You are a liar.”

“That’s no way to talk to any person.”

“I’m just a little tired of your saying you don’t care what goes on around here. I think that’s pretty damn weak.”

“It doesn’t do me any good to care about what’s going on.”

“You don’t care if I go to Concord or stay here,” she said. “You don’t care if Mr. Ellis gives me money. You don’t care if I work on a fishing boat forever or get hauled off to college. You don’t care if I stay up all night having sex with a Wishnell. Really, Dad? You don’t care about
that?
”

“That’s right.”

“Oh, come on. You’re such a liar.”

“Stop saying that.”

“I’ll say what I want to say.”

“It doesn’t matter what I care, Ruth. Whatever happens to you or your mother won’t have anything to do with me. Believe me. I got nothing to do with it. I learned that a long time ago.”

“Me or my
mother
?”

“That’s right. I got no say in any decisions involving either one of you. So what the hell.”

“My
mother
? What are you, kidding me? You could totally dominate my mother if you bothered. She’s never in her life made a decision on her own, Dad.”

“I got no say over her.”

“Who does, then?”

“You know who.”

Ruth and her father looked at each other for a long minute. “You could stand up to the Ellises if you wanted to, Dad.”

“No, I couldn’t, Ruth. And neither can you.”

“Liar.”

“I told you to stop saying that.”

“Pussy,” Ruth said, to her own immense surprise.

“If you don’t watch your fucking mouth,” Ruth’s father said, and he walked out of the house.

That was the incident.

Ruth finished cleaning up the kitchen and headed over to Mrs. Pommeroy’s. She cried for about an hour on her bed while Mrs. Pommeroy stroked her hair and said, “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

Ruth said, “He’s just such a pussy.”

“Where did you learn that word, hon?”

“He’s such a fucking coward. It’s pathetic. Why can’t he be more like Angus Addams? Why can’t he stand up for something?”

“You wouldn’t really want Angus Addams for a father, would you, Ruth?”

This made Ruth cry harder, and Mrs. Pommeroy said, “Oh, sweetheart. You’re sure having a tough time this year.”

Robin came into the room and said, “What’s all the noise? Who’s blubbering?” Ruth shouted, “Get him out of here!” Robin said, “It’s my house, bitch.” And Mrs. Pommeroy said, “You two are like brother and sister.”

Ruth stopped crying and said, “I can’t believe this fucking place.”

“What place?” Mrs. Pommeroy asked. “
What
place, hon?”

Ruth stayed at the Pommeroy house through July and August and on into the beginning of September. Sometimes she went next door to her house, to her father’s house, when she knew he’d be out hauling, and picked up a clean blouse or a book to read, or tried to guess what he’d been eating. She had nothing to do. She had no job. She had given up even pretending that she wanted to work as a sternman, and nobody asked her anymore what plans she had. She was clearly never going to be offered work on a boat. And for people who didn’t work on boats on Fort Niles in 1976, there wasn’t a whole lot else to do.

Ruth had nothing to occupy herself. At least Mrs. Pommeroy could do needlepoint. And Kitty Pommeroy had her alcoholism for companionship. Webster Pommeroy had the mudflats to sift through, and Senator Simon had his dream of the Museum of Natural History. Ruth had nothing. Sometimes she thought she most resembled the oldest citizens of Fort Niles, the tiny ancient women who sat at their front windows and parted the curtains to see what was going on out there, on the rare instances that anyone walked past their homes.

She was sharing Mrs. Pommeroy’s home with Webster and Robin and Timothy Pommeroy, and with Robin’s fat wife, Opal, and their big baby, Eddie. She was also sharing it with Kitty Pommeroy, who’d been thrown out of her house by Ruth’s Uncle Len Thomas. Len had taken up Florida Cobb, of all desperate women. Florida Cobb, Russ and Ivy Cobb’s grown daughter, who rarely said a word and who’d spent her life gaining weight and painting pictures on sand dollars, was now living with Len Thomas. Kitty was in bad shape over this. She’d threatened Len with a shotgun, but he took it away from her and blasted it into her oven.

“I thought Florida Cobb was my goddamn friend,” Kitty said to Ruth, although Florida Cobb had never been anyone’s friend.

Kitty told Mrs. Pommeroy the whole sad story of her last night at home with Len Thomas. Ruth could hear the two women talking in Mrs. Pommeroy’s bedroom, with the door shut. She could hear Kitty sobbing and sobbing. When Mrs. Pommeroy finally came out, Ruth asked, “What did she say? What’s the story?”

“I don’t want to hear it twice, Ruth,” Mrs. Pommeroy said.

“Twice?”

“I don’t want to hear it once out of her mouth and once out of mine. Just forget it. She’ll be staying here from now on.”

Ruth was beginning to realize that Kitty Pommeroy woke up every day more drunk than most people would be in their entire lives. At night, she would cry and cry, and Mrs. Pommeroy and Ruth would put her to bed. She’d punch them as they struggled with her up the stairs. This happened nearly every day. Kitty even clocked Ruth in the face once and made her nose bleed. Opal was never any help in dealing with Kitty. She was afraid of getting hit, so she sat in the corner and cried while Mrs. Pommeroy and Ruth took care of everything.

Opal said, “I don’t want my baby growing up around all this yelling.”

“Then move into your own goddamn house,” Ruth said.

“You move into your own goddamn house!” Robin Pommeroy said to Ruth.

“You all are just like brothers and sisters,” Mrs. Pommeroy said. “Always teasing each other.”

Ruth couldn’t see Owney. She hadn’t seen him since the wedding. Pastor Wishnell was making sure of that. The pastor had decided to spend the fall on a grand tour of the Maine islands, with Owney as his captain, sailing the
New Hope
to every dock in the Atlantic from Portsmouth to Nova Scotia, preaching, preaching, preaching.

Owney never called Ruth, but how could he? He had no number for her, no idea that she was living with Mrs. Pommeroy. Ruth didn’t so much mind not being called; they’d probably have had little to say to each other on the phone. Owney wasn’t much of a conversationalist in person, and she couldn’t imagine dallying away hours with him over the line. They’d never had all that much to talk about. Ruth didn’t want to talk to Owney, anyhow. She wasn’t curious to catch up with Owney on local gossip, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t missing him or, rather, craving him. She wanted to be with him. She wanted him in the room with her so that she could feel again the comfort of his body and his silence. She wanted to have sex with him again, in the worst way. She wanted to be naked with Owney, and thinking about that filled up a good bit of her time. She thought about it while in the bathtub and in bed. She talked to Mrs. Pommeroy again and again about the one time she’d had sex with Owney. Mrs. Pommeroy wanted to hear all the different parts, everything the two of them had done, and she seemed to approve.

Ruth was sleeping on the top floor of the big Pommeroy house, in the bedroom Mrs. Pommeroy had first tried to give her when she was nine—the bedroom with the faint, rusty blood spatters on the wall where that long-ago Pommeroy uncle had taken his life with a shotgun blast in the mouth.

“As long as it doesn’t bother you,” Mrs. Pommeroy told Ruth.

“Not a bit.”

There was a heating vent on the floor, and if Ruth lay with her head near it, she could hear conversations throughout the house. The eaves-dropping brought her comfort. She could hide and pay attention. And, for the most part, Ruth’s occupation that autumn was hiding. She was hiding from her father, which was easy, because he wasn’t looking for her. She was hiding from Angus Addams, which was slightly more difficult, because Angus would cross the street if he saw her and tell her what a dirty little whore she was, fucking around with a Wishnell, trash-mouthing her father, slinking around town.

“Yeah,” he’d say. “I heard about it. Don’t think I didn’t fucking hear about it.”

“Leave me alone, Angus,” Ruth would say. “It’s none of your business.”

“You slutty little slut.”

“He’s just teasing you,” Mrs. Pommeroy would tell Ruth if she happened to be there, witnessing the insult. This made both Ruth and Angus indignant.

“You call that teasing?” Ruth would say.

“I’m not goddamn teasing anyone,” Angus would say, equally disgusted. Mrs. Pommeroy, refusing to become upset, would say, “Of course you are, Angus. You’re just a big tease.”

“You know what we have to do?” Mrs. Pommeroy told Ruth again and again. “We have to let the dust settle. Everyone loves you here, but people are a little worked up.”

The biggest portion of Ruth’s hiding occupation during August involved Mr. Ellis, which meant she was hiding from Cal Cooley. More than anything else, she did not want to see Mr. Ellis, and she knew Cal would someday fetch her and bring her to Ellis House. She knew that Lanford Ellis would have a plan for her, and she wanted no part of it. Mrs. Pommeroy and Senator Simon helped her hide from Cal. When Cal came to the Pommeroy house looking for Ruth, Mrs. Pommeroy would tell him she was with Senator Simon, and when Cal asked for Ruth over at the Senator’s, he was told she was at Mrs. Pommeroy’s place. But the island was only four miles long; how long could that game last? Ruth knew that when Cal really wanted to catch her, he would. And he did catch her, one morning at the end of August, at the Ellis Granite Company Store building, where she was helping the Senator build display cases for his museum.

The inside of the Ellis Granite Company Store was dark and unpleasant. When the store was closed, almost fifty years earlier, everything had been stripped from the place, and now it was a gutted, dry building with boards over the windows. Still, Senator Simon couldn’t have been happier with Ruth’s strange gift to him, after the Wishnell wedding, of the key to the padlock that had kept him out of the place so long. He couldn’t believe his fortune. He was so excited about creating the museum, in fact, that he temporarily abandoned Webster Pommeroy. He was willing to leave Webster down at Potter Beach alone to scour the mud for the last elephant tusk. He had no energy these days to worry about Webster. All his energy was devoted to fixing up the building.

“This is going to be a splendid museum, Ruth.”

“I’m sure it will be.”

“Mr. Ellis really said it was fine to make the place into a museum?”

“He didn’t say that in so many words, but after I told him what you wanted, he gave me the key.”

“So it must be fine with him.”

“We’ll see.”

“He’ll be delighted when he sees the museum,” Senator Simon said. “He will feel like a patron.”

Ruth was beginning to understand that a major part of Senator Simon’s museum was going to be a library for his vast collection of books—books for which he had no more room in his house. The Senator had more books than artifacts. So the Senator had to build bookshelves. He’d already planned it. There was to be a section for books on shipbuilding, a section for books on piracy, a section for books on exploration. He was going to devote the entire downstairs for his museum. The storefront would be a gallery of sorts, for rotating exhibits. The old office rooms and storage rooms would have books and permanent displays. The basement would be for storage. (“Archives,”